Join Dr. Ralph W. Moss and Ben Moss as they delve into the science of tomatoes and their potent component, lycopene. Uncover the groundbreaking research that positions lycopene as a significant agent against cancer. Discover the fascinating journey of lycopene from the humble tomato to its swift presence in our bloodstream, fueling our body’s defense mechanisms. This episode is a compelling look into how nature equips us with powerful tools to combat disease, and offers practical insights on maximizing the benefits of tomatoes in our diet.

Articles Cited in this Episode:

Karppi J, Kurl S, Nurmi T, Rissanen TH, Pukkala E, Nyyssönen K. Serum lycopene and the risk of cancer: the Kuopio Ischaemic Heart Disease Risk Factor (KIHD) study. Ann Epidemiol. 2009 Jul;19:512–8. doi: 10.1016/j.annepidem.2009.03.017. Epub 2009 May 13. PMID: 19443241.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10472…via%3Dihub.

Kim JY, Paik JK, Kim OY, Park HW, Lee JH, Jang Y, Lee JH. Effects of lycopene supplementation on oxidative stress and markers of endothelial function in healthy men. Atherosclerosis. 2011 Mar;215:189–95. doi: 10.1016/j.atherosclerosis.2010.11.036. Epub 2010 Dec 9. PMID: 21194693.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21194693/

The is dedicated to optimizing the health and well-being of Californians.

Insilico Medicine, a clinical-stage generative AI-driven drug discovery company has announced that the company has used Microsoft BioGPT to identify targets against both the aging process and major age-related diseases.

Longevity. Technology: ChatGPT – the AI chatbot – can craft poems, write webcode and plan holidays. Large language models (LLMs) are the cornerstone of chatbots like GPT-4; trained on vast amounts of text data, they have been contributing to advances in diverse fields including literature, art and science – but their potential in the complex realms of biology and genomics has yet to be fully unlocked.

The new shots could make malaria protection more plentiful and affordable.

In two recent papers, Saint Louis University researchers report finding high concentrations of microplastics present in a Missouri cave system that had been closed to human visitors for 30 years.

Elizabeth Hasenmueller, Ph.D., associate professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and associate director of the WATER Institute at SLU, and her team published findings in the journals, Science of the Total Environment and Water Research, finding significant microplastic levels in Cliff Cave in Saint Louis County, Missouri.

The research, which originated from Hasenmueller’s research group and Karst Hydrology class, allowed students on the team to participate in field research and publish their findings.

A strange pair of galaxies several billion light-years away could be evidence of a hypothetical ‘crease’ in the Universe’s fabric known as a cosmic string.

According to an analysis of the properties of the pair, the two galaxies may not be distinct objects, but a duplicate image caused by a trick of the light. And the reason the light is duplicated could be because of a scar in the space between us and the galaxy, creating a gravitational lens.

A paper describing this cosmic string candidate, led by Margarita Safonova of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, has been accepted in the Bulletin de la Société Royale des Sciences de Liège, and is available on preprint server arXiv.

The effect of a TE on its host can be classified analogous to the effect of point mutations. In the majority of cases, the consequences of a TE their activity (transposition to a new genomic site) is either neutral or deleterious. The latter occurs, when TEs disrupt genes and their functions, or when, they trigger de-novo genomic instability by transposition or TE-mediated chromosomal rearrangements, which can lead to disease^{1, 3}. TEs can occasionally have a positive impact on the host genome, for example, by impacting gene regulatory networks. In the British peppered moth (Biston betularia), a TE inserted within the first intron of the cortex gene, resulted in increased transcription levels, subsequently affecting cell cycle regulation during wing-disc development through the amount of cortex protein product, resulting in the iconic melanic form⁴. However, more research is needed to understand these different evolutionary impacts that TEs can have when interacting with their host genome.

The increased accessibility to high throughput sequencing technologies has greatly increased our ability to analyse genetic differences caused by changes at the nucleotide level, and patterns of natural selection on coding sequences, and simultaneously allowed us to disentangle phenotypic differences at the nucleotide level. Mounting evidence has started to shed light on non-coding regions having important effects on genomic variation³. While TEs can be found in the genomes of virtually all organisms, large proportions of TEs are often absent from reference genomes, as their repetitive nature impedes their assembly and can result in collapsed regions within the reference genome^{2, 5}. These difficulties have led to an increased demand for reference genomes that are of a higher quality and are more complete. More importantly, a new demand for high-quality annotations of non-coding regions in reference genomes has surfaced. Annotations of non-coding regions are imperative to study the evolution of these regions between and within species. Improvements in sequencing techniques, especially the addition of long-read sequencing, and improved bioinformatic analytical tools are resulting in the assembly of increasingly gapless reference genomes, enabling the curation of high-quality TE annotations.

The current efforts of large consortia, such as the VGP⁶ and the B10K⁷ to create high-quality references for a wide variety of organisms provide invaluable data to improve our endeavours for a better understanding of TEs. With these new resources we can take our research into TEs and their effects on host genomes further, for example, to better understand the evolution of complex traits across phylogenomic scales. One such a complex trait is seasonal bird migration and recent research across a migratory divide in willow warblers identified a diagnostic TE correlated with migratory direction⁸. Here we focus on the Eurasian blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla), another iconic model species for bird migration, and consequently, the resource published here may be able to add insight to the quest to resolve the genetic background of migratory behaviour.

Genome engineering may be the future of medicine, but it relies on evolutionary advances made billions of years ago in primordial bacteria, the original masters of gene editing.

Modern day genome engineers like Columbia’s Sam Sternberg are always looking forward, modifying these ancient systems and pushing them to perform ever more complex feats of gene editing.

But to uncover new tools, it sometimes pays to look backward in time to understand how bacteria first created the original systems, and why.

Forward-looking: While AI has been at the forefront of most tech industry conversations this year, the new wave of generative AI is still far off the concept of an artificial general intelligence (AGI). However, legendary developer John Carmack believes such a technology will be shown off sometime around 2030.

Carmack, of course, is best known as the co-founder of id Software and lead programmer of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. He left Oculus in December last year to focus on Keen Technologies, his new AGI startup.

In an announcement video (via The Reg) revealing that Keen has hired Richard Sutton, chief scientific advisor at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, Carmack said the new hire was ideally positioned to work on AGI.